Blog About Photography

The White Ribbon

I inten­tion­ally avoid review­ing pho­tog­ra­phy (or really any­thing else) on this blog for a slew of rea­sons, and now we can add this one: try­ing to write some­thing about a movie that doesn’t sound like it belongs in an ad in the New York Post is a lot harder than you’d think. I saw “The White Rib­bon” tonight though, and I absolutely have to write about it. It’s an expe­ri­ence that is at once sub­tle, beau­ti­ful, ghostly, and rev­e­la­tory. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

It’s pos­si­ble to watch this film and see noth­ing at all but a metic­u­lous, well-​​crafted con­fu­sion, beg­ging for a man­ual to deci­pher it. It also seems that one might receive the film’s cen­tral theme loud and clear, but then miss the for­rest through the trees: if a film about a cer­tain period in Ger­man his­tory is inevitably a reflec­tion on the com­ing of Nazism, how does this one stack up to the schol­ar­ship on that sub­ject? I’ve now read sev­eral reviews from major cul­tural arbi­tra­tors that are wildly, shock­ingly, off base, and I’ll note that Fan­dango does a far bet­ter job in one sen­tence describ­ing this film than do sev­eral lengthy attempts by the New York Times. That sen­tence, by the way, is this: “An under­cur­rent of mal­ice runs through a Ger­man vil­lage, as a series of mis­for­tunes plagues its cit­i­zens in the year before the out­break of World War I.”

Alter­na­tively: “For­get about Weimar infla­tion and the Treaty of Ver­sailles and what­ever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse,” A.O. Scott writes snidely in his review, demon­strat­ing what would appear to be a fun­da­men­tal mis­read­ing of both the film and the nature of his­tory. The his­tory of a peo­ple is not con­fined to spe­cific iso­lated events, it extends infi­nitely across the past. And while “White Rib­bon” depicts quite a bit of abuse of all stripes, it must be under­stood to be part of the “under­cur­rent of mal­ice” engrained into the very way of life of towns­peo­ple that pop­u­late the film. This is what the nar­ra­tor means when he says that he does not know how much of his story is true, but it may explain what has hap­pened in his country.

That’s not exactly a shot in the dark, either: A dif­fer­ent Times arti­cle quotes Film­maker Michael Haneke this way: “I depict the con­di­tions that have to be in place for peo­ple to be recep­tive to  ide­ol­ogy, to be will­ing to clutch at any straw what­ever that will allow them to get out of the extremely dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion they’re in.”

Haneke exe­cutes this so per­fectly, it’s like get­ting hit by a bus. Art is not schol­ar­ship. Art is art. There should be no ques­tion that this film is art of the high­est caliber.

It’s one of the best movie’s I’ve ever seen. So I’m sit­ting here won­der­ing why I was so intent on skip­ping it when it came out two years ago. And it’s because it has the shit­ti­est trailer ever.

Jason Schwartz­man in Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chava­lier

Wes Anderson’s 13-​​minute film Hotel Chava­lier was made avail­able exs­clu­sively though iTunes over the week­end, which I only know about because Shane linked to it. Appar­ently, it serves as pro­logue to Wes Anderson’s upcom­ing film, The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­ited. It’s a free down­load, and, obvi­ously, is worth a watch.

Pro­logue is Anderson’s word for what this is and I don’t think that’s very accu­rate. Inso­far as the piece relates to the upcom­ing film, it func­tions more as a teaser. (More ques­tions are raised than answered, unless you’re ques­tion is “What does Natalie Portman’s ass look like with a huge bruise on it?”). The promi­nent place­ment of famil­iar Apple prod­ucts — sort of star­tling in the con­text of Anderson’s uni­verse — reveals the inten­tion of the piece: Hotel Chava­lier is a clever ad for for Apple. I’m sure Apple wanted to tie them­selves to Anderson’s “brand;” they’re fans prob­a­bly over­lap a whole lot.

This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily make this any less valu­able. I loved Anderson’s Amer­i­can Express com­mer­cial from a cou­ple of years ago, and I think there can be sig­nif­i­cant crossover between artis­tic and com­mer­cial endeav­ors. My point: just say­ing this is a piece of mar­ket­ing. I think that’s pretty clear.

I’m not entirely sure how I came across this but the Checker­board Film Foun­da­tion has been mak­ing doc­u­men­taries about artists, com­posers and writ­ers for 30 years. They pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary on John Szarkowski in 1998. There is also another film called Szarkowski on Eugene Atget and one called Szarkowski on Szarkowski. They’re all avail­able for sale on DVD for the bar­gain price of $45. I searched Google Video and YouTube for all or part of these guys to no avail. Please let me know if you’ve seen any of them, I emailed and asked if there was a stu­dent rate.

Read more: John Szarkowski

© Fran­cisco Scavullo

I just picked up a ticket to see Black White and Gray: A Por­trait of Robert Map­plethorpe and Sam Wagstaff at Sil­ver­docs on Sat­ur­day. I don’t know all that much about Wagstaff, but obvi­ously I’ve had quite a bit of expo­sure to Map­plethorpe. Just from read­ing the descrip­tion of this film, I learned that their room­mate in the early 1970s was Patti Smith. This flick’s gonna be sweet, I’ll write about it after.